Five takeaways from IBM Think 2025

As IBM Corp.‘s client and partner event, Think 2025, wrapped up last week in Boston, to no one’s surprise the primary theme of the event to no one’s surprise was artificial intelligence — but there were several other related topics, such as quantum and hybrid cloud.

I thought the keynotes and Q&A with IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna were excellent as he provided his vision for those areas, which were differentiated from what I’ve heard before. It’s important to note that IBM serves the needs of enterprises, and those companies will adopt technology dramatically differently than consumers and small businesses.

Below are my top five takeaways from IBM Think:

The future of enterprise AI is small models. Since the rise of ChatGPT, large language models have been all the rage. At Think, IBM talked extensively about the value of small language models or SLMs. Both are neural networks designed to understand and generate human language, but they are markedly different. As the name suggests, LLMs use a “large” number of parameters, often in the billions, and are trained on massive data sets enabling them to perform a wide range of tasks. Conversely, SLMs are more narrowly focused using fewer parameters. SLMs excel at domain-specific tasks and use significantly less power. For consumers, LLM powers are ideal as they can answer everything from Civil War history to how to learn to play guitar. Businesses do not need models this broad – but rather domain-specific models to do a very specific task. At Think, IBM rolled out dozens of SLMs to enable its customers to bring AI that won’t break the bank in terms of computing power.
The mainframe is alive and kicking. If the mainframe were a person, it would be Mark Twain as reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. At the event, IBM announced its latest flagship product, LinuxONE Emperor 5. During the Q&A with analysts, Krishna discussed how the mainframe business is growing at IBM. Industries such as financial services, which have relied on mainframes in the past continue to do so. He provided a data point that about 90% of credit card transactions are processed on mainframes. IBM has done an excellent job of making mainframes significantly more open than they have been in the past and that’s enabled organizations to take mainframe data and now use it as part of their AI strategy. For companies that rely on mainframes, that will likely continue into the foreseeable future. IBM is, by far, the leader in this space, and I expect the company to continue to drive innovations into mainframes.
IBM innovation focuses on “high value.” In the information technology industry, innovation comes in many shapes and sizes. As an example, hyperscalers have driven new ways of consuming IT resources that are far more cost-effective and convenient than ever before. Krishna talked about this and discussed how IBM is focused on “being able to invent things that do not exist anywhere else.” Current examples include quantum and the previously mentioned domain-specific small language models. These are focus areas Krishna believes IBM is well positioned. That’s not to say M&A isn’t part of IBM’s strategy. It obviously is as the company has made some big moves under Krishna, including the recent HashiCorp acquisition. However, he said, “I believe for the absolute game-changers, where we get a step function up in value and in the brand of the company, we must invent things that are very, very hard. And one goes through IBM’s history, whenever we have done that, we have changed both the market and the world’s perception of IBM.” He cited Java as an example where the technology was once used primarily for consumer applications, but IBM has brought the necessary tools, security, and ecosystem to make it mainstream in enterprises. Looking ahead, expect IBM to continue to focus on those hard problems that few other companies can solve.
AI will replace jobs but also create new ones. One question asked of every executive about AI is the impact on jobs. Many CEOs shy away from this question with generic responses. To Krishna’s credit, he did not and talked about it openly and honestly. To underscore his thoughts, he looked back at industrial automation, the steam engine and other “big shifts,” which displaced jobs but then created new ones because of the change. Krishna does expect that, over time, AI will displace some jobs at IBM, but the company is currently offering reskilling to several employees to help with the transition. One of the more interesting questions is what new jobs will be created. This has yet to be determined but if one uses the Internet as an analogy, that technology shift democratized access to information and created an upswell of data workers. AI democratizes access to expertise so it stands to reason that there will be jobs working with the output of AI. Job replacement is coming, but so is job creation, and it’s important for workers to keep looking ahead and be willing to evolve as the business requires.
Partners play a key role in IBM’s growth. Day 1 of IBM Think was Partner Plus Day which focused on IBM’s massive ecosystem of resellers, ISVs, systems integrators and other companies that partner with IBM. While IBM is well-positioned in areas like AI and quantum, it can’t win alone. The partners, including startups and smaller independent software vendors play an important role in helping create use cases, ideation and scaling the business technology. There’s no question that IBM does enterprise well and because of that, its partner ecosystem is filled with other companies that target large companies. However, startups are often more innovative and agile and can help create new use cases for emerging technology. As AI matures and quantum becomes real, I’m expecting to see IBM continue to diversify its partner ecosystem to bring new use cases to companies large and small.

IBM has been perceived by many to be an old, stodgy company, but at Think, Krishna was crystal-clear: IBM is driving innovation into established areas of strength such as Java and the mainframe, as well as AI and quantum. Time will tell if the company can lead these industries, but the activity at Think 2025 was certainly a good start.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala